Drawing out critical conversations in the management classroom

Arts-based methods are of increasing interest to management educators and this activity can be used to support a community of inquiry in the virtual classroom. The activity commences by asking students to draw (using no words!) a managerial or workplace experience. Students then explain their drawing to a peer. The educator-led debrief focuses on disclosing the subjectivity of experience and then triggering a reflection of the cohort’s narratives against management theory. This thirty-minute activity, designed to initiate discussion of challenging aspects of management practice, cultivates social presence in the management classroom and reveals the subjectivity of organizational life

A 'lived experienced’ tool for managing and building project delivery capability

This paper discusses a new, integrated tool-set for project managing. This tool-set is a response to calls for project managers to be able to apply new project managing thinking ‘in practice’. The tool-set integrates the project-space model and the Syllk model. Together, they bring visibility to enablers and constraints to project delivery capability, and these learnings can then be integrated into the organisation’s systems to build in a tailored manner ongoing project management capability. Specifically, the tool-set highlights the hindrances to project delivery and what capabilities need to be ‘wired’ into an organisation to remove them. This tool-set integrates into future organisational initiatives the learnings from concrete ‘lived experiences’ of project managing

And then came complex project management

The subject of management is renowned for its addiction to fads and fashions. Project Management is no exception. The issue of interest for this paper is the establishment of the 'College of Complex Project Managers' and their 'competency standard for complex project managers.' Both have generated significant interest in the Project Management community, and like any other human endeavour they should be subject to critical evaluation. The results of this evaluation show significant flaws in the definition of complex in this case, the process by which the College and its standard have emerged, and the content of the standard. However, there is a significant case for a portfolio of research that extends the existing bodies of knowledge into large-scale complicated (or major) projects that would be owned by the relevant practitioner communities, rather than focused on one organization. Research questions are proposed that would commence this stream of activity towards an intelligent synthesis of what is required to manage in both complicated and truly complex environments

Reconceptualising project management methodologies for a post-postmodern era

As populations grow, technology advances, and socioeconomic complexity rises, organisations are required to recurrently adapt to their particular environments in order to survive. Project management methodologies are one relatively recent adaptation to the organisations’ faculty for means of production. A literature review provides a framework to trace the evolution of modern project management methodologies through time and illustrates how they have been shaped by the various and particular pressures and constraints of their environments. The analysis reveals how modern project management methodologies are inherently ‘old technology’ and how a reconceptualization of their function and structure is required if they are to enable organisations to recurrently gain the competitive edge in an increasingly complex and demanding world. Conclusions are drawn about the convergent evolutionary nature of the various forms of methodologies and reasoned speculations are made about their future function, design, and significance as a strategic organisational device

The private life of project managers - the social struggle

The Private Life of Project Managers is a conceptual paper that takes a Darwinian approach to the concepts, practices, and behaviours of project managers. It contends that evolutionary science can help understand why project managers do what they do, and why they sometimes engage in convoluted, intricate, and occasionally devious or contradictory activities. This conference paper examines some of the day-to-day habits of the modern project manager and of their group behaviour, and how these lead to their survival and advancement in the complex corporate world rather than making a direct positive impact on the project. The intention of the paper is to make the case for a new way of thinking about project managers and their projects which embraces their human fallibilities and the often unpredictable nature of their project work

21st century project management: open source body of knowledge

By considering the literature relating to the application of evolutionary principles to the practices and artefacts of modern project management, this paper sets out an argument for an open source body of knowledge for project management. Practitioners and academics alike are challenged to rebuild and develop their profession by rethinking project management in the light of evolution. Whilst acknowledging that we in the Western corporate environment are inextricable from the project management practices and artefacts we are driven to produce, this paper argues that it is imperative that we intervene in the developmental process of the project management body of knowledge and engineer it to become more open, equitable, and domain specific

'C' for craftsmanship not 'C' for complexity

I put it to you that project managers that have a track record of successfully managing or bringing to completion highly dynamic bodies of work aren't born with that skill, they are made. And they are made, under the guidance of others in the real world of managing projects. And we don't know very much about this, and we should

How to train your manager: a Darwinian perspective

In this chapter I want to look at advising upwards through a completely different lens. I want to change the whole point of view about what is going on during the advising upwards process and present what I consider to be the beginnings of a Darwinian explanation for what goes on. More particularly I want to explore an evolutionary basis for the advising behaviours and tools managers use. Not only do evolutionary principles expose the biological foundations of our behaviours, they show us how we can use this information in constructive behaviour-changing ways

Developing a systemic lessons learned knowledge model for organisational learning through projects

A significant challenge for government and business project organisations is to ensure that lessons are learned and that mistakes of the past are not repeated. Both knowledge and project management literature suggests that in practice lessons learned processes rarely happen, and when it does it is concerned with lessons identification rather than organisational learning. There are limited practical models for general management to use to conceptualise what organisational learning is and therefore how to enable it. However, aspects of health care, nuclear power, rail, and aviation organisations have successfully implemented organisational learning by way of the Swiss cheese model for safety and systemic failures. This paper proposes an adaptation of the Swiss cheese model to enable project organisations to conceptualise how they learn from past project experiences and distribute successful project know-how across an organisational network of elements such as individual learning, culture, social, technology, process and infrastructure

Talking with Russian Dolls: revealing the project 'lived experience' through Heidegger’s spatiality and temporality

This paper proposes the metaphoric tool of nested Russian Dolls through Heidegger’s concepts of spatiality and temporality to reveal facets of the 'lived experience' of project managing. The paper is a conceptual discussion of Heidegger’s notion of space and time applied to the experience of project work. The metaphoric tool enables us to place the project manager’s personal experience as primary; to access facets of the experience that may not be on the 'official' record (because they were unknown or concealed); and highlights that there is a non-linearity and complexity in the task of project managing. This paper aligns with the APROS/EGOS conference and project stream themes as it draws on a non-mainstream conception of space in project work and highlights how this is aligned to facets of the 'lived experience' of project managing